We're always attracted to the edges of what we are, out by the edges where it's a little raw and nervy.

And so the ordinary unendurable torments we all experienced were indeed exceptional in the way they were absorbed in each heart.

The voice of the Constitution is the inescapably solemn self-consciousness of the people giving the law unto themselves.

And though the newspapers called the shooting the Crime of the Century, Goldman knew it was only 1906 and there were ninety-four years to go.

You can't remember sex. You can remember the fact of it, and recall the setting, and even the details, but the sex of the sex cannot be remembered, the substantive truth of it, it is by nature self-erasing, you can remember its anatomy and be left with a judgment as to the degree of your liking of it, but whatever it is as a splurge of being, as a loss, as a charge of the conviction of love stopping your heart like your execution, there is no memory of it in the brain, only the deduction that it happened and that time passed, leaving you with a silhouette that you want to fill in again.

I lived in New York for a couple months. It seemed to me at first an incredibly clean place with well-dressed people and washed cars and bright-painted red-and-yellow streetcars and white buildings.

Good writing is supposed to evoke sensation in the reader - not the fact that it is raining, but the feeling of being rained upon.